Digital commons creation

Anonymous interaction design

Pop-up activation strategy

Community experiment facilitation

Foster organic engagement

Enable unmoderated communication

Test social interaction feasibility

Explore informal onboarding

Before the Second World War, the lines between work and leisure were far more fluid. People often mingled, exchanged ideas, and built relationships outside of strictly defined professional contexts. In today’s workplace, those informal spaces have been eroded by reputational risk management, corporate oversight, and HR policies that now dictate much of organizational culture. What once took place organically at the water cooler or in the smoking area has been replaced by carefully curated digital channels, leaving little room for unregulated or spontaneous connection.The Virtual Smoking Area was created as a deliberate response to this shift. By borrowing the social role that physical smoking areas once played, neutral, informal, and unsupervised, it offers an unmoderated online environment that values chance encounters. Participants are invited to enter a playful digital commons where hierarchy is stripped away and conversation can flow freely without agenda. In doing so, it asks how play, freedom, and community might coexist in a hyper regulated digital age.

Access to the Virtual Smoking Area began with a QR code, displayed on a pop up truck, that opened a custom world on Gather.ai. Once inside, participants could create an avatar and decide how much or how little they wanted to reveal about themselves, including the option to be completely anonymous. The space was designed to encourage exploration. Users navigated the environment on their screens, joining private video chats triggered by proximity, or opting for public exchanges on an open text board.To encourage group interactions, the environment included umbrellas or topic based areas where people could gather, listen in, or start new conversations. Anyone could choose to join an ongoing theme or propose one of their own. These mechanics replicated the dynamics of informal in person encounters, but in a way that embraced digital freedom. Public text threads provided asynchronous interaction, while the proximity based video chat allowed for private, spontaneous dialogue that would otherwise be impossible in formal virtual platforms. The result was a space that felt closer to a plaza than a platform, open, unscheduled, and constantly shifting based on who chose to show up.

Over the course of two days, a pop up truck stationed at the corner of 14th Street and Fifth Avenue acted as the gateway to this experiment. Curious passersby scanned the code, entered the Virtual Smoking Area, and began to explore. A total of 289 people engaged in a wide range of behaviors, from idle wandering and playful loitering to one on one conversations, small group debates, and asynchronous posting on the message boards. Some simply observed from the margins, while others initiated unexpected exchanges that grew into extended dialogues. The experiment revealed an appetite for informal online spaces that resist the constraints of traditional digital communication tools. It gave members of The New School community, many of whom work and study remotely, an alternative form of interaction that official systems do not offer. More broadly, the project demonstrated how digital platforms can be designed with openness and trust at their core, showing that there is cultural and social value in spaces where community can form without supervision. And as participants carved out these fleeting moments of unscripted connection, the project left a larger question lingering: in a world shaped by reputational risk and cancel culture, could this be a glimpse of what comes next?